God Punishes Us With What We Can't Imagine...

"It's alive! Alive!" Mary Shelley Dreams

Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in. For example, during the Cold War Era there was a policy of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - that kept things in check. No one would start a war - no rational person, that is - if there was assurance that they themselves would be destroyed.

It was a rational approach.

In fact, it was an island of reason within the great blue sea of insanity.

Same thing with guns.

It used to said, and probably still is by the dim, that, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
And the dim bulb would say this and leave us all amazed at the irony of it all.

However, I hold that Guns actually do kill people.
During the past 20 years as gun ownership grew exponentially, I thought that such a vast "population" of weapons would lead to an age where the statistics of deadly shootings began to also exponentially increase.

Ecce arma!  Behold the weapons!

With nuclear weapons, there was an incredible amount of training that armies and navies had to go through to make things safe, to prevent accidents.
With guns? There is no incredible amount of training. There is barely any training. I mean, a couple of years ago a baby shot its mother dead in a Walmart, using a gun in the mother's purse.

Did this baby shoot? No, the gun did. The baby could not have the intention. The gun did.
Oh, it was an accident...... !!??
Really. An accident.
It was an accident that there was a fully loaded hand gun in a mother's purse, and that purse was lying on top of a Walmart shopping cart, and the baby grabbed it. An accident.
The gun did not have intention, but it was an integral part of an intentional landscape...

The gun was a necessary adjunct and part of the landscape. The gun was imbued with the faith of being-safe and being-secure. The gun, that was part of the promise to secure that young mother and to secure that young baby, turned on them in a tragic way.

That was the irony: the things of incredible violence into which we place our faith and our lives turn against us for no good reason that we can understand. We are left dumb and struck and we cannot explain the turn of events.

It reminds me of a fable. Perhaps "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" wherein a inanimate, unliving object is given life! The Frankenstein fable, is it not? "It's alive! Alive!" yelled Colin Clive as Victor Frankenstein yelled in James Whale's movie.

That which we considered dead is suddenly alive.
We are finding out that Guns are a Power in the World and at a high enough concentration, Guns - like the mythical Skynet of the film Terminator - begin to act as if they were already independent of mankind. At a critical concentration, independent and baneful artificial intelligence precipitates out of the idolatrous mix of dreams and fears of those who trust in violence.

Guns only need our fingers on the trigger. Everything else they can handle.

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ps. The title is a quote from Stephen King's Duma Key.